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Customs Proposes To Substantially Transform The Substantial Transformation Test

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 08.08.08

By Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, 73 Fed. Reg. 43385 (July 25, 2008), Customs & Border Enforcement has proposed substituting, for many purposes including rulings under the Trade Agreements Act (TAA), a "tariff shift" approach for determining country of origin in lieu of the longstanding and subjective "case-by-case" approach to determining the place where "substantial transformation" occurred. Under the proposed rule, contractors selling products under the contracts subject to the TAA would have to reevaluate their products under the rigid, pre-established formulaic tariff shift analysis to ensure products with significant non-designated country content qualify for sale to the federal government.

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Client Alert | 2 min read | 11.14.25

Defining Claim Terms by Implication: Lexicography Lessons from Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corporation

Claim construction is a key stage of most patent litigations, where the court must decide the meaning of any disputed terms in the patent claims.  Generally, claim terms are given their plain and ordinary meaning except under two circumstances: (1) when the patentee acts as its own lexicographer and sets out a definition for the term; and (2) when the patentee disavows the full scope of the term either in the specification or during prosecution.  Thorner v. Sony Comput. Ent. Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. highlights that patentees can act as their own lexicographers through consistent, interchangeable usage of terms across the specification, effectively defining terms by implication....